Melania Trump isn’t the only woman on todays agenda at the Republican National Convention... Spencer Tunick's photograph involved 100 nude women holding large mirror discs, reflecting the knowledge and wisdom of progressive women and the concept of “Mother Nature” into and onto the convention center, cityscape and horizon of Cleveland.

Ylioppilaslehti
2015
Editorial illustration for an article about catholics who support women's right to abortion

Insect Collector
2014

New Scientist
2016
Editorial illustration for New Scientist magazine, for an article about optogenetics

Gardener
2014

Depletion
2015

Luonnonsuojelija
2015
Editorial illustration for the magazine of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation Luonnonsuojelija.
The article covered the history and current state of Finnish forests and forest industry

Let’s get some new art back in the blog. Did this piece for MATTER about the video games that inspired and influenced me as a kid. Sega Genesis Rocket Knight Adventures is the nut. I wrote a little something about it too, I’ll include it at the bottom.Thanks to AD Erich Nagler.

Also, just a quick update. There’s less than half of my inventory left! Get it in before the weekend is over if you want it before the holidays!

"The 16-bit era was filled with animal mascots, robots, big swords, 1-ups and heart shaped lives. Which makes Rocket Knight Adventures the quintessential game. Not the most iconic character or game, but nothing gushes the campy staples and aesthetic of the era quite like it. I always feel five years old again when I play it. I don’t think I’ll ever let the pixelated generation go. It always reminds me of a time when electronics didn’t just feel like the future, it felt like magic. You could still feel the human hand that scrambled to put this Frankenstein of pixels together. It was a much more mysterious time for technology and electronics.

If you look at my art, you can tell I’ll always hold pixels dear to my heart. And even more so, you can tell I view retro tech from when I was growing up as these mysterious artifacts, and the 8 and 16 bit worlds as bizarre magical dimensions. But at the end of the day you can also find something fun and campy in my art. I do miss the animal mascot era. It’s never good to take yourself too seriously. Games don’t try to imagine anymore, they just regurgitate what reality already looks like.”

The development of the Mermaids in Disney's Peter Pan involved several artistic hands. This cel set-up was made to announce the later arrival of the film during the holiday season of 1952. The background is lovely, but the quality of the drawing and inking leaves a lot to be desired. I suppose the top artists were busy finishing the film, which was released in February of 1953.

One of Mary Blair's many concept sketches featuring stylized mermaids with short bodies.

An experimental cel set-up. The background shows an exploratory painting technique, and the character pose is inspired by a drawing from the model sheet below.

The original Mermaids designs were the work of Fred Moore, but this model sheet looks like Milt Kahl might have worked over Fred's drawings.

Another preliminary cel set-up, which combines the above- and the under water world in an interesting way.

This live action reference frame clearly shows how the actresses' poses influenced the final animation, as can be seen in the artwork below. The mermaid with the harp is Margaret Kerry (who also posed for scenes with Tinker Bell) and the one holding a horn is the one and only June Foray.

Kevin Smith is a filmmaker, writer, podcast mogul and professional babbler. I’ve been a fan of Smith pretty much his whole career. I missed the boat when Clerks came out, but went crazy for the comic book-reference-heavy Mallrats, and loved Chasing Amy, which featured Ben Affleck and Jason Lee playing a comic book artist and inker. It was like “OMG, a comic geek is making Hollywood films! One of us has made it to the big time!”

I was also in peak comic book-collecting form when Smith exploded onto the comics scene, writing the Marvel Knights Daredevil series. At the time, no big shot Hollywood filmmaker had stooped so low as to want to work in comics, and for fanboys like me, Smith deciding to write comics felt like Michael Jordan deciding to play in the local pick-up game. (Smith later admitted he had no idea what the hell he was doing and needed artist Joe Quesada to slowly train him how to write comics. Fake it till you make it, baby).

Smith was 24 when Clerks was released, which he funded himself for $27,000, using many of his friends as actors and filming it at the convenience store he worked at. The film was screened at the Sundance Film Festival, won the Filmmaker’s Trophy and was bought by Miramax. It launched Smith’s career and influenced the indie film boom of the 1990s. Although Smith focuses more on podcasting these days, he’s still in the arena, making movies. His latest film Tusk, about a podcaster who gets kidnapped by a crazy dude who then proceeds to grotesquely transform his captive into a walrus, was released last month.

The main thing I enjoy about Smith’s podcasts and gabfests is his encouragement to aspiring artists and creatives. He insists that if a fat, lazy nerd like him can make it, then anyone can. Smith draws his fair share of haters and critics, but his attitude is ‘Hey, if you don’t like what I do, then by all means, go make something better yourself.’ Smith has taken the recent poor performance of Tusk in stride and hopes people don’t take it as an excuse not to try weird shit:

“Don’t be afraid to do weird stuff, so long as you do it cheaply and cover everyone’s bets. Be bold. Be stupid, if you have to: so long as you don’t hurt anybody, what’s it matter how dopey your dream is? If I hadn’t made TUSK? If I’d let it die as a podcast? I wouldn’t have three other movies I’m now making within the span of a year. Some folks will try to shame you for trying something outside the norm; the only shame is in not trying to accomplish your dreams.”

The quote used in the comic is taken from Smith’s memoir/self-help book Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good. It’s from a chapter where Smith writes about his 2011 movie Red State, a 100% independent film he released and distributed. Sick of dealing with movie studios where the marketing budget for the film would have cost more than the actual film to make, Smith produced and screened the movie himself, touring America with the film and screening it to sold-out theatres across the country. At the end of the chapter, Smith thanks the small group of people who helped make the film possible, who he calls ‘Why Not?’ people:

“There are plenty of “Why?” people in the world. Whenever you hit them with an idea, they start in with their bullshit.
“Why bother?”
“Why try that?”
“Why do you think you’re better than everyone else?”
“Why?”
To counteract this, simply surround yourself with folks who ask only “Why not?” As in …
“Wanna make a movie?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Remember: It costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever. I’ve spent the better part of my career getting up after movies and encouraging potential artists in the audience to give it a shot, pointing to myself as proof that anybody can make their dreams come true. I don’t do this altruistically: I’m selfishly insuring that I have cool shit to watch one day by encouraging anybody to follow passions like film or storytelling.”

- Follow Kevin Smith on Twitter.
– If you’re a comic book lover, then I highly recommend Smith’s Fatman on Batman podcast. Smith’s interviewed many comic book legends such as Grant Morrison, Jim Lee, Greg Capullo, Joe Quesada, Jeph Loeb, Neal Adams and Denny O’Neil. Although they’re Batman-centric, the in-depth interviews cover the creator’s whole careers and how they got into the business. Plus I’m pretty sure Smith is stoned during most of the interviews, so they’re hilarious (Warning: major potty language).
– This comic is a a follow-up to last weeks Full Body Education strip. I wanted to show that besides the education system, parents of course play a major role in realising a child’s potential.
– Last but not least, earlier this week I announced that I was giving away some of my original art to help promote my upcoming book. Here’s how you can win it.

Working from her Brooklyn, NY studio, artist Zaria Forman creates pastel landscapes inspired by the beauty and vastness of the sky and the sea. Hers is an art created for facilitating a deeper understanding of a world in crisis. She is fascinated by the constantly-changing nature of water and inspired by the challenges of her medium.

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) doesn’t just evoke a certain stripe of mid-century, after-hours, big-city American loneliness; it has more or less come to stand for the feeling itself. But as with most images that passed so fully into the realm of iconhood, we all too easily forget that the painting didn’t simply emerge complete, ready to embed itself in the zeitgeist. Robin Cembalest at ARTnews has a post on how Edward Hopper “storyboarded” Nighthawks, finding and sketching out models for those three melancholic customers (one of whom you can see in an early rendering above), that wholesome young attendant in white, and the all-night diner (which you can see come together in chalk on paper below) in which they find refuge.

These “19 studies for Nighthawks,” writes Cembalest, “reveal how Hopper choreographed his voyeuristic scene of the nighttime convergence of the man, a couple, and a server in the eerie Deco diner, refining every nuance of the countertop, the figures, the architecture, and the effects of the fluorescent lighting.” In each sketch, more pieces have fallen into place: a diner assumes their position, the light finds its angle, the perspective shifts to that of an outsider on the darkened street. Cembalest quotes Whitney curator Carter Foster describing the final product as a “marvelous demonstration of both extreme specificity and near abstract compositional summation on the same surface beguilingly [which] reflects how empirical observation and imagination coexisted in Hopper’s head.”

Despite how many elements of the real world Hopper studied to create Nighthawks, it ultimately depicts no real place. The painter himself posed for the male figures, and his wife modeled for the female. As for the locale, seen in the final drawing just above, Cembalest notes that “after years of research and scholarship, experts have determined that Nighthawks was not inspired by one specific diner. Rather, it was a composite of wedge-shaped intersections around Greenwich Avenue. Its curving prow seems partly inspired by the Flatiron Building.” In a way, it almost seemed too realistically New York to actually exist in New York. Hopper painted a distillation of a sense of American place, and like many American places, I’ve never quite known whether I’d love to drop in at the Nighthawks diner (though I’d have to find a front door first), or whether I should count myself lucky that life hasn’t relegated me to it. You can learn more about the fascinating storyboarding of Nighthawks at Art News and see many more sketches. Speaking of the sketches, they come courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sometimes panoramas just don’t work. A shaky hand or moving object can really mess things up, but sometimes, accidents can lead to funny outcomes and everybody wins! Over the last year I’ve noticed a lot of funny panoramas on reddit and decided to compile the best ones into a single post. Enjoy!

The ice bucket challenge is pretty played out. So why post this photo? Quite simply because I can find scant little information about this curious Beatles pic. One Beatles blog dates the picture back to 1965. After that, bupkis. No information. So, for once, I’m throwing up my hands and asking for a little help from our friends. Somewhere out there, an ardent Beatles fan knows the story, and we’re hoping that you can give us the lowdown, either by email, or in the comments section below. We thank you in advance…

Update: We got an email from a former radio exec who offers more details. Jon tells us: “These shots were done in the Bahamas back in 1965 while the Beatles traveled the world to film their second movie Help! This sequence most likely came as a result of set close up shots that director Richard Lester needed of each Beatle during a pool sequence since John is wearing that same shirt during several of those water sequences shot in the Bahamas. Ringo has always said it was cold during the shoot as they filmed it during a cooler time (Jan.?) that year. That would explain John’s look after being doused.” And there you have it!

I’ve also embedded an excellent video by Tony Zhou that explores ‘Bayhem‘ — his style of camera movement, composition and editing that creates something overblown, dynamic and distinct. It’s worth a watch if you’re into film.